


The Winter Queen

by LectorEl



Series: The Desert King [1]
Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Gen, Homesickness, Implied Relationship, So much angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-21
Updated: 2013-01-21
Packaged: 2017-11-26 09:17:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/649018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LectorEl/pseuds/LectorEl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time, not too long ago, a girl was born.<br/>Some stories can only end in tragedy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Light and Shadows

Once upon a time, not too long ago, a girl was born. And for a time, it was good. There was warmth, and light, and love.

And then there was not. She was cast out, to make her way in the world as best she could, or die in the attempt. That is all that is known of her early years. She was loved, until she was not loved. She was wanted, until she was not wanted. This is not a story with easy explanations. She was cast out, and that is all we know.

She was cast out, and that was the last of light that she would know for many years. But she grew. As a plant will, rooted in the broken rock just beyond the cave’s mouth, twisted and stunted, not as she could- should- have been. She grew cold, and she grew hard, her soul numb to the taste of sweetness. By the time she was barely halfway grown, her hands were calloused and rough, and her nails were edged in the blood she had shed. Whatever beauty she might have possessed had fled, leaving a angry, stone hearted creature. The world she lived in was dark and unkind, ruthless in its cruelty, and she was a creature equally savage. Death and life were one to her, equal in value and meaning, and a human was no more than a corpse in the making.

This would be the end of her story, the story of yet another of the world’s monsters, if not for a man who saw her, and saw the child she had been instead of the killer that she was. He offered her his hand, and took her with him, out of the darkness and into the shadows. The man of two colors, who saved her and damned her in the same act.

He took her, and he taught her, and he made a human of the beast she had become. She gave him her loyalty in return, fierce and unconditional. She killed for his smile, bloodied her hands further for his praise, lived for his approval. And when he ordered her to run, a taint blooming beneath his skin, twisting him from the the man he had been, she ran. Until the leather of her boots was worn through, and the bottom of her feet were tattered and bloody. Because she loved him, as fiercely as her monster-heart was able, and it was the last order he would ever give her. To run, and to live.

She stepped out of the shadows, heart-sick and bloody-soled, to follow that last order. She married well, married high, casting aside her dark origins to claim a queen’s title. Her husband was a good man, kind, perhaps weaker than he should have been. She did not love him. Her heart belonged to a man who death had taken, and left his body behind to walk the earth. But she gave him all else she had to give. Her loyalty, her fierce devotion and unceasing protection, her faith and her trust. And in time, she gave him a son.

Her child, the flesh of her flesh, the blood of her blood– who knows if she loved him? Who knows if she even could? But she tried. Oh, how she tried. And if that was not enough, it was her best, everything she had to give. Her heart longed for the shadows she had known, for the man that had been her salvation, but she turned her eyes to the sun, and gave herself over to life beneath it.

When death came, years later, it came wearing the face of the man of two colors. And she could no more refuse it than she could will her lungs to still themselves. His blade pierced her heart, and she smiled as she fell dying, to have this last gift from the man she loved.

The man of two colors watched her die, and felt his eyes burn. He could not understand why it was so. But her death made his dead heart scream, and the only thing that silenced it was the sight of her son, his eyes as blue as his mother’s.


	2. The Length of Exile

Once upon a time, not too long ago, a boy was born with his mother’s shadowed eyes. He came into the world on a cold summer’s night, weeks before he was due. When he slid from the womb, it was without a sound, no breath in his small body.

Janette had set her frozen gaze upon the midwife, and the physician, and cast them from her chambers. She cradled the newborn close, against her heart, where he would hear her pulse and be reminded of what his body must do. Then she blew air into his tiny lips, hands careful on his chest as she coaxed his tiny lungs to fill.

“ _Breathe_ , child,” she whispered, voice so quiet that it did not stir the air. “You must breathe. Your kingdom is waiting for you.” At last, his chest stuttered, and he inhaled, gulping air greedily in his first unassisted breath.

“There you are, Timotheé.” She kissed his blood-slicked forehead, and smiled, a look of softness in her eyes that few would recognize. “Little prince. You shall never go hungry.”

Timotheé grew, wide-eyed and watchful, as if he had absorbed his mother’s nature in the womb. By the time he was six months old, he could spot even the smallest of changes in his nursery, and would fuss until they were put to rights. Janette knew little of motherhood, and even less of infants. She could not begin to fathom a guess if such talent was normal.

She sighed, and stopped before a window, absently arching up on her toes to keep her bare feet off the freezing stone. It was a windy night outside, the snow blowing furiously through the air. The castle would have a white Christmas in the morning.

Somewhere out there, beyond the snow, past the winter-fallow fields, across the rolling hills, lay the country where she had lived for so long. Schatten, land of tall forests and broad rivers, with its capital full of twisting streets.

“I wish you were here,” she said, eyes prickling inexplicably. They could not be tears. She had not cried since she had been young. She _felt_ young in that moment, though, young and frightened. So much younger than she had been when Slade had caught her with her hand in his pocket. She was only twenty-two, with a baby at her breast, a husband who she tried to be worthy of, and a kingdom she now ruled.

She longed for Schatten, and the brick and plaster walls of the Wylsøne’s family home. Slade had always insisted that they celebrate Christmas properly, and never mind that Janette, on the cusp of womanhood, had not been a child. It has been seven years since she had a Schattenian Christmas, and the Bristol traditions were just similar enough to make her chest ache with memories.

If she were back in Schatten-if everything had not gone so terribly wrong-they would be breaking bread right now. Lenten bread, like she had never seen in Bristollen, thick and salty, dipped in honey and then garlic. ‘ _As a reminder that life is sweetness and bitterness both_ ,’ Slade had explained to her, his voice as close to reverent as it ever was.

Janette closed her eyes, and let her forehead drop against the thick, bubbly glass of the window. “I’m living Slade. Like you asked. But I want to come home.”

Time passed, and her kingdom prospered. Janette kept waiting for the day when seeing lavender fields instead of thick forests ceased to startle her, but it never came. Bristollen was not home to her, and she did not know it ever could be. It was easier when she was away. She did not have to be at home in foreign countries, and at times, she could pretend it was Schatten that she’d be returning to when a journey was over.

Her son would grow while they were away, and Janette sometimes looked at him, and wondered how she had produced such a child. He took after neither of his parents, instead having patience and capacity for love that most reminded her of Wintergreen. Her beautiful son, who would never know the man that had been her father in all but blood.

 Wintergreen would have known how to love Timotheé, but Wintergreen was dead. Janette was all that was left of him, and she had little enough to give her son. Love was a thing of softness, of yielding, and she was made of brittle edges. If what she offered was not love, as others understood it, than it was the closest thing she had.

“Listen closely, Timotheé,” she said, catching her son’s eye from across the wrought iron garden table. “I have a story for you.” The fairy tales his nurses tell are silly things, full of love that does not waver, virtue rewarded, and happy endings. The stories of her childhood were much different. Birlibi the Rat-King gave nothing without cost, and those who went into Frau Trude’s hut did not come out.

And so becomes their tradition. Janette told her son the stories she had learned, first as a homeless child, and then as a ward of a knight. Sadder and sharper than the ones considered appropriate for a prince, tales of handless maidens and harps of hair and bone. There are no happy endings to these stories. Only tragedy and pain, and the bittersweet taste of survival.

The ghost of Janette’s childhood lurked in the words. She told her son of where she came from, disguised as make-believe tales. In one story, she told of the way hunger scraped the undersides of your ribs and turned to nausea. In another, of the bitter rage of having nothing to call your own. Bits and pieces, never to be assembled. But passed on, nonetheless.

When death finally came for her, Janette was ready. She had told her son all the stories that she knew, and had given him what she can. She was tired of lavender fields and winters that never turned cold enough, and her home was calling her.

“Slade,” Janette said, and smiled, spreading her hands. He stared, and did not recognize her. She'd known he would not, and was simply grateful that she could see him one final time.

His blade slid home in her flesh, but she ignored it, ignored the pain, stepping into the thrust so that she could do this final thing.

“Thank you, for everything,” she breathed out, too quiet to be heard, as she embraced him. Her cheek on his shoulder, her arms around his chest, as if she was young again, greeting the one she loved most after a long day.

Home. For the first time since she arrived in this country, she was home.

Janette closed her eyes, and let death take her.


	3. Timotheé Remembers

Timotheé guards his mother’s memory more fiercely than he would any jewel. For she had been his mother, imperfect and flawed, but his. His mother had been herself, and she could have been no other. She had been beautiful the way a blizzard was beautiful. He could not have separated her beauty from her danger, and he would not have wished to. As a wolf could only be a hunter, so too had been his mother’s nature.

This is how he remembered her, dark silk and calloused hands, honest words and distant smiles. A woman of cold elegance unsurpassed by all the beauties of the court. He had grown from childhood watching her manipulate diplomats with conversations veiled in layers of meaning and the tiniest of gestures. There was no match for her, not in all the world.  

Timotheé could not say with surety that she loved him. She had tried to, as best she was able, as best her wounded heart would allow. He did not begrudge her what she could not give him. She had possessed no great warmth to share with her son, so shared the only thing she had to offer instead.

_Listen carefully, my son, and I will tell you a tale_

His mother’s stories had frightened him as a child, but he had craved them all the same. From his mother, for whom the normal gestures of affection were more alien than the sands of Arabâya, this was how she had told him he was valued. These shadowed tales of tragedy, passed from mother to son. A secret tradition that not even his father had been welcome to participate in.

Their traditions were few, but all the more precious for it. His mother had done nothing thoughtlessly.

And now she is a cold body buried beneath the earth, her husband beside her. Everything she built has been burned to ashes. He is all that is left of her.

So Timotheé does not speak of these small things that had died with her. It felt as if by speaking he would let them fly free of his grasp, never to return. The silence sharpened grief to something that could cut if handled unwisely, but that too felt proper. Her memory should be no less dangerous than she.

This is his inheritance from her, her eyes, her stories, and the pulse of her blood within his veins. Timotheé is his mother’s son. He had loved her, as only a child could love a parent, and he has long forgiven her for her failings.


End file.
